


everything is good

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Established Relationship, Even if it's a Terrible One, M/M, Murder, POV Second Person, Too Much Whelk Probably, temporary paralysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-27 02:20:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7599682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Any chance of you believing Whelk’s sleep paralysis theory disappears as you lose all feeling in your body. You’re wide awake and drifting, humming, a consciousness in a corpse. Maybe it’s something about summer afternoons, you think, though that makes no sense – it should be dark or winter or thunderstorms that set you off. There shouldn’t be a trigger for cicada calls and dappled sunlight. </p>
<p>Or, if Gansey got flash-forwards to being Cabeswater, Noah can get flash-forwards to being dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everything is good

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this kicking around in my head for aaaages, I'm super happy to get it out. (It also occurred to me right at the end that Noah probably wouldn't be at Aglionby over summer, but by then it was Far Too Late)
> 
> My wife (!!!) [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) beta'd for me, she is excellence and starlight.

It is a honeyed summer afternoon, sweet light and the invasive hum of insects filtering through your dorm window, and you can’t feel your toes. You can’t feel the rest of you either, but toes seem like the least alarming part of yourself to centre the problem on. Flat on your back in your bed, there’s not much to do but will your feet to twitch and congratulate yourself on not panicking.

You think it’s only been a few minutes, though the slow drift of time around you makes it hard to tell. A prism on your windowsill spins light out like lace over the ceiling, pretty enough to watch since you can’t turn away from it. The world is jarringly, incongruently peaceful, and you force yourself to breathe in, breathe in, and wiggle your toes.

Nothing.

You breathe out and look for patterns in the shimmers on the ceiling. You had a poster up, but after the racket you made when it fell on you in the night Whelk forbade you to replace it, and now there are only scraps of blue tack you’re too lazy to collect. Your blankets have slid half to the floor in the night, draped over the shoes and backpacks and books you cram up beside your bed to preserve floor space, and the sheet left over you is thin enough to have no weight, not be restricting, do nothing to separate you from space. You try to clench your fists. An unsurprising nothing. It’s a wonder you’re not panicking more. You barely feel anything at all, scared or anxious, calm or not. It is a little like limbo, drenched in light.

Whelk throws open the door and strolls in, glancing around as though the room might have somehow acquired a butler who will take his towel. “Get up, Czerny, it’s half one,” he says, like he didn’t haul himself out of bed only half an hour ago. He throws his towel at you and somehow it is the impact of damp, soap-scented cloth hitting your face that breaks the spell.

You swipe it off, and then you take one second to be you again, flexing your fingers and waggling your toes as everything returns to you in a rush. The deadness of limbo is replaced by the aftertaste of all your missing panic, now softened by the giddy edge of relief that whatever it was, it’s over. “It happened again,” you say, pushing yourself up on your elbows to watch Whelk get dressed. He’s yanking clothes out of his dresser, dismissing them, and throwing them on the floor, and you know that later he’s going to complain they’ve gotten wrinkled. “The thing where I can’t move.”

“Sleep paralysis,” he says without looking at you. The defensive briskness of it reminds you that he is much less enamoured with the supernatural when it’s centred on you.

“I don’t know,” you tell him. He’s carelessly naked in front of you, and your eyes trace the muscles in his back. He was hyperaware of your attention for the first week after you started messing around together, but self-consciousness just isn’t practical in a room this size. “I don’t think it’s like that. I was awake for ages before everything went still, it wasn’t like I was still asleep. It was like I just… stopped.”

“Czerny,” Whelk says, tugging on a shirt he thinks makes him look broad-shouldered, “It’s half one, and we missed lunch so we’re going to have to waste even more time eating before we can get out to the woods. If you could expedite our expedition by getting out of bed, I’d appreciate it.”

‘Appreciate’ means he’ll stop whining, so you skip showering and haul some clothes off your chair, revelling in the sensation of not being in the Aglionby uniform. There is absolutely nothing rebellious about wearing jeans and a t-shirt in the weekend, but it still feels a little defiant while you’re on school grounds. If nothing else, you know the vice principle would call you ‘slovenly’ or ‘unkempt’ while feeling a little sad, and that’s a victory to boys in holey Chuck Taylors everywhere.

Whelk drives, which means Whelk picks the music, which means you suffer through the eight minutes of U2 it takes to get to a diner. He shoves a slice of pizza into your mouth to shut you up and ignores your attempts to talk around it. A very cute girl sees from two tables over and snickers. Whelk straightens up immediately when he notices the attention, and takes a grim sip of the black coffee he ordered to look sophisticated. You dump a heaped spoonful of sugar in for him.

“Fuck off, Czerny,” he snaps, but he drinks the rest much faster. It’s fun and it’s bright and it’s your usual Sunday, enough to make you forget the deadened weight of your body in bed.  

You eat the last of his chips for him while he scrubs the table down with napkins, clearing it out for the books and maps he brought. He’s got a plan, because of course he does, and he wears the authority it lends him well. “So, last time, we followed the stream north,” he says, tracing the line you took. The red ink of your readings mark your path, and the numbers give away how mundane the trip had been. “We’ll head south this time; since the source apparently isn’t in walking distance, we’ll try and see what it joins.”

“Cool,” you tell him around a mouthful of fried potato. “Let’s get properly lost this time too, yeah? Actually, I was thinking, if we got a camera we could do a proper Blaire Witch thing –”

Whelk swats you with the map as he folds it up. Your retaliation is smacking him on the butt when he stands, and the red blush that sweeps him is almost as rewarding as the laugh of the girl two tables down. You grin at her, and Whelk gets a grip on your upper arm to drag you out of the diner. “I told you not to do that,” he snaps, still red.

You consider promising not to, and decide not to bother. You spank him on the way back to the car instead.

Whelk’s car is a glorious, gleaming triumph of overseas engineering, but it’s not nearly as fun as your Mustang. He tells you not to mess with the music settings, so you immediately change it from disc to radio and flick through every station looking for whatever can drown out his griping best. To your delight, you manage to find a station playing _Tubthumping_.

“Czerny, please,” he groans, and you laugh and you laugh until a headache splits your skull open, a chisel of pain sledgehammered in so fast you feel queasy as you reel from it. Whelk doesn’t notice, busy with the road and the aural assault you set on him, and you scrabble dizzily at the car door to grip the handle. Everything around you is swinging horribly to the side, set off by the explosion in your left temple, and you don’t understand what’s happening or how it could possibly hurt so much.

There is a second pulse, impossibly hot, like a molten pick driven in beside your eye. Your sweaty palms wring the handholds they’ve found, and you’re doubled over, almost gasping, sure the car must have crashed and you’re in shattered little pieces.

And then the pain goes away. There is no aftershock and no phantom waves of it, no fuzzy remainder, just pure clarity where a second ago you thought your head must have cracked open on the dashboard. You pull yourself upright, chest still heaving, incomprehension wrecking you as surely as the pain had. All you get from Whelk is an unimpressed sideways glance, the music now a deafening, aggravating mess in such a small space. You guess you looked like you were still laughing.

The rest of the ride is long enough for you to pull yourself back together, for the tremors in your hands to subside and your breathing to settle. You’re not really in the mood for exploration anymore – you’d rather lie down and put your headphones on and try to leave your body, if your body’s going to treat you like this – but Whelk still is, and he steers you onwards.

The forest swallows you in a gulp, an ocean of green the two of you can only trudge along the bottom of. Last time you’d liked it, the heavy sense of the canopy overhead and the possibility that Whelk was right, that there could be just about anything in the hooded spaces between the trees. Today it is less wonder and more dead leaves and molding bracken, worsened by the familiar and tiring suspicion that Whelk’s belief in the supernatural is not as strong as your own.

He leads the way, following the stream and his dowsing rod, calling instructions over his shoulder to you with an easy arrogance that is actually merited, for once. He’s in his element, which you have defined as all semi-archaic, dull and irrelevant academic pursuits, and you do like the gleam of his smirk as he dictates to you, smug and over-confident and gallingly attractive. You write while you walk, the scrambled loops of your handwriting looking more like you tried to embroider the map than transcribe real words on it. It’s a distraction, if nothing else.

He notices before you that the readings are changing, but you notice before him that the woods have changed. You’re either fifteen or fifty minutes from the entrance, the half-light of the forest eating time as steadily as everything else, and there’s a chill in the air, a chill in the earth, a very regular and irritating high-pitched beep from one of Whelk’s machines. “What is it?” you ask him, and you’re not sure if your sprinting heart is scared or excited. _Eager_ might be the word – so ready for a reward for all your dedication.

“A cold spot,” Whelk tells you, but there’s no hint of dismissal in his tone. He checks the readings again and you look around – a copse of old oaks, solemn and guarded. There’s nothing particularly magical about them. There’s nothing particularly compelling about the copse at all, except you still feel compelled – your whole body aches, and the throbbing in your temple picks up where it left off in the car.

“There’s something here,” you tell Whelk, cradling the side of your head in one hand. You don’t know what to call it. A gust pushes through the trees, brings the seething hiss of the undergrowth’s whispers with it, and you eye the sentinel oaks suspiciously. Maybe if you knew what to call it, you’d be more afraid.

Another gust, and this time you’re watching the trees for the long sweep of the wind, the endless murmur of the leaves, and you see that the tree doesn’t shake, and the branches don’t move, and there is no wind just the rush of whispers in your head, too low to make out the words if there are any words at all.

Fear bites you hard, and you look to Whelk hoping to find your panic echoed on his face, but he’s slapping the beeping machine with the calm of someone who does not have whispers crawling through their skull. You try to listen, but you can’t pick out a language, let alone words; the tone is all that really comes through, non-threatening and hushed. Something like reassurance being transmitted in the least reassuring way possible.

You decide that it is not your day.

It takes the better part of the week for Whelk to stop whining about you hustling him out of the woods early, but you never claimed to be brave and ‘sounds that only you can hear’ are exactly the kind of thing that could lead to your tragic and unexplained disappearance in the woods. It’s not that you’re not curious, it’s that you’re not curious _enough_. Your taste for adrenaline ends where the eldritch whispers begin.

Summer is an interminable thing this year, and it’s hard to believe that there was ever more to Aglionby than too many empty rooms with sunlight glinting off closed windows. Heat muddies your brain and Whelk’s, though he doesn’t admit it, and you spend your time in a short circuit to the vending machine in the lobby.

The ley line business is stalled out while you argue over returning to the copse with the voices, and your current compromise is to help with the research and look for alternate leads. It’s depressingly like studying, and a solid reminder of why you leave this part to Whelk and only show up when it’s time to tramp around in the woods.

Your biggest victory all week is convincing Whelk that you should take the research outside; It’s testament to the stifling heat in your room that he agrees, even though he knows you’ll focus on your books for less than a minute before chucking them aside and lying back in the grass. You feel Whelk’s eyes on you for a long minute as you stretch out, shirt riding up to bare your pasty stomach, but he looks back at his books and deliberately ignores the blush creeping over his cheeks.

Any chance of you believing Whelk’s sleep paralysis theory disappears as you lose all feeling in your body. You’re wide awake and drifting, humming, a consciousness in a corpse. Maybe it’s something about summer afternoons, you think, though that makes no sense – it should be dark or winter or thunderstorms that set you off. There shouldn’t be a trigger for cicada calls and dappled sunlight.

Whelk reads beside you, not paying attention, and you wonder how long it will take him to notice, if he ever notices. Overhead the sky is a paint sample sheet of blue, too deep and too distant, and time skips and starts and passes you by. Eventually, Whelk slides a hand over the bared stretch of your stomach, snatching it back a second later. “You’re _freezing_ ,” he accuses, staring offended at the way you’re basking; even his hand was sun-warm.

You curl your fingertips up to your palm, and the rest of you remembers how to move too, though you sit up and stretch with all the grace of an old animatronic. Your tongue is meat in your mouth, but talking helps loosen it, and you tell Whelk, “It happened _again_.” You really are cold, too, your fingers almost too stiff to move. The ebbing numbness means you’re starting to feel afraid again, a well overdue spike of fear of the unknown. You don’t want to link it to the whispering trees, but they both gave you the same unbalanced kind of feeling. “Do you care at all?”

“Of course I _care_ ,” Whelk says, affronted, but you suspect he was offended that you voiced the question and not that you don’t believe in him. “Now that we’ve ruled out the reasonable explanation, we’ll start looking into it. Do you think it’s medical, or supernatural?”

You know what you think, and you don’t want to answer. Abandoning Whelk and the books, you go back to your room for your walkman and drag your headphones on too roughly. Usually you’d lie down to listen, but the thought of being still makes your spine crawl, and you head out instead. Familiar beats fill your ears, loud and bright, and you walk out of Aglionby through the city, you walk angry loops on the surrounding roads, you walk until the sun has set and the heat has leeched out of the evening and you’re starving from a missed dinner. Whelk doesn’t look particularly impressed when you get back, but he still lets you crawl into bed with him and that’s the only reason you get to sleep that night.

You get more headaches. More of the sudden, blistering kind and more of the kind that creep in behind your eyes and build in throbbing waves until you’re hunched over with your hands pressed to your temples. You get cold on warm days, and you get cold wrapped up in three blankets by the heater while Whelk sweats in just shorts. You get checked out and there is nothing, medically, wrong with you. Half of you is sick with fear and the sense that something is happening to you that you do not understand. The rest of you is drifting, immobile, strong emotions out of reach.

“At least you’re not bouncing around all the time anymore,” Whelk says. He’s at his least empathetic after a fight with his girlfriend, but it’s fair payback for all the compassion you’ve been showing him lately.

Maybe you should make an effort. You were alright this morning, good enough for a fierce impromptu tussle with the summer dregs of the lacrosse team, but now you have to drag yourself off your bed and the three steps across the room to his are very nearly too far. Whelk is sulking, holding a textbook he’s not reading, staring a challenge at you over the top of the page. After a moment’s consideration you just thwump down beside him and roll up against his side. Passive affection is easy, and even if you’re still cold to the touch he’s not in a bad enough mood to push you away. After a minute, he says, “She’s a bitch, anyway.”

She’s not, but he’s not in the mood to hear it. You just stay where you are, until he shifts, runs a hand through your hair and you can bend more comfortably around him. “Do you think I’m alright?” you ask him eventually, because he’s the one who knows things, he’s the one who plays explorer and tries to hunt down the unknown. You’d define whatever’s happening to you as ‘unknown’.

He sighs a little, still less interested in your problems than his own, but he answers, “Yes, Czerny, I think you’re fine.” A short pause while he comes up with something mundane to patch up your life with, and then he offers, “It’s just summer putting you out of sorts. You’ll perk up when term starts. All your terrible friends come back and you can run screaming through the halls with them.”

You smile into his shoulder, and he makes a series of noises that suggest he is very put-upon by having to offer you comfort at all, and he starts working his hands under your shirt until his girlfriend calls and he rolls you off the bed to answer.

One week before the end of summer and Whelk loses everything. You’re out getting food for the worst of it, but you come back in time to see his car loaded onto a truck. Whelk’s outside, watching with an expression you haven’t seen on him before, blank and dark. His hands are shaking. You don’t think he’s noticed.

He gets in on the passenger side, and you turn your music down in case he wants to talk, but he doesn’t. You were having a great day, right up until you came home to this, and you’re not sure what to tell Whelk now. You don’t think your parents would want to cover his school fees, and you don’t think he’d want to accept, anyway – he barely admits to being your friend. You could buy his car back for him, maybe. You think it over as you drive to the woods, stopping as close as you can get to the clearing you found months ago.  

You assume that Whelk wants to try the ritual as something to distract himself with, the hobby furthest away from Aglionby and his pillaged dorm room. You don’t think he’s actually worked out what the ley line wants. You let the car idle for a minute after it’s stopped, so you can look at how his white-knuckled fists rest on his knees, his stare piercing the dashboard and the ground below, seeing all the way down to magma. You reach out for his hand, but he jerks at you, turning that awful, infinite, empty gaze on you instead.

Any words you might have offered clog your throat, and you look away, trying not to feel rejected. He plucks your skateboard from the backseat and gets out of the car, and it’s only a moment before you can follow. It seems like the least you can do for him, really. The only thing you can think to do at all. The afternoon is sweet and golden, warm and trilling with insects, and you start down the path to the clearing.

Something slams into the side of your skull, and the impact is so familiar that you assume it’s just in your head again. It takes blood in your mouth, the sideways view, hard dirt under you and a wet trickle down your face before you realise. You look up, too slow, and then you feel yourself crack. Agony drives everything else away, fear and betrayal and your body’s instinctive actions, your hands scrabbling on the dirt, the sound of broken sobbing from somewhere above.

It takes a very long time.

When it’s done, you don’t hurt anymore. You look down at your corpse, immobile and pulped on the forest floor, and you flex your cold fingers. Whelk is kneeling at your side, half-laughing, wretched, deranged sounds, and he says, “Oh, Czerny,” and “ _fuck_ ,” and then he doubles over. You regard him for a few seconds, and don’t feel much of anything. The best you get is a distant and ethereal sense of relief that you finally, finally understand. You’re dead on the ley line, and that’s not as dead as you should be; Whelk didn’t know about this.

You didn’t get to see the end of summer. You didn’t get a lot of things, and now there’s nothing left in you to mourn the loss. You listen as Whelk devolves into tremors and hiccups with only the vaguest sense of sorrow, for him or yourself or both. Dappled sunlight falls on you, through you, leaves you a cold and distant spectre, and for a while, you just stop.

**Author's Note:**

> eyy thank you very much for reading! I'd love to know what you thought if you want to leave a comment or come find me on [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)


End file.
